Companies require both summary and detailed market performance data in order to make correct decisions on the design and pricing of products for potential customers and existing customers. This is particularly the case for companies that provide financial products, such as insurance products. Although a number of standard marketing analysis reports are typically available, these canned reports are of little value to a user seeking specific business intelligence. To get this information, the user usually must submit an ad-hoc request to an information technology (IT) professional at the company who has programming skills, familiarity with the various databases, and specific knowledge of the business. The IT professional then conducts a number of time-consuming searches across several databases in order to generate the specific market performance analysis report for the user.
Because the databases tend to be unconnected, each database often being in a different file format, market performance analysis reports generated in the above manner typically take a long time to complete. In addition, the reports often yield large volumes of very detailed data, making them difficult to review and analyze. And because the databases are usually unconnected, the data contained in the reports tends to be poorly integrated, which often raise additional market performance questions that require the user to submit one or more additional ad-hoc data requests in order to address the additional questions.
By way of an example, if a user has an interest in introducing a new auto insurance product designed for young potential customers of a new risk group, the user would need to submit multiple requests, each request directed to information from a specific data source, in order to obtain a good overview of this potential market category. The requested data may include, for example, past cancellation counts for young policy holders from a “Marketing Department Cancellation” file, sales close rates for young potential customers from a “Marketing Department Quotes & Issues” file, and in-force counts on young policy holders from an “Active In-Force Department” file. In order to narrow the pool of young potential customers to those with acceptable insurance risk characteristics, the retrieved data is merged with data on insurance risk on young potential customers (obtained typically from a separate fourth data source).
Accordingly, what is needed is a more efficient way to generate market performance analysis reports. More specifically, what is needed is a way for the user to quickly and easily generate market performance analysis reports that may contain summary and/or detailed data on virtually any aspect being tracked and measured for a given product.